Forum Moderators: buckworks
the site's only been running on the dedicated server for a cpl days now, but i can't help thinking that there is something going wrong with the new server which is causing this problem.
would a couple of people horribly mind popping over to the site and letting me know if something strange happens when they get there? like potentially a large flashing sign saying: LEAVE NOW! or more likely some random error or browser https warning message?
private msg me for web address please...
the assistance would be much appreciated!
1. How are you measuring conversion? Is it the number of click-throughs to sales? If so have you taken into account the fact that click-throughs may not even be reaching your server?
2. If users aren't reaching your server, could it be that you did a hard switch, ie switched off your shared server at the same time that you brought up the dedicated? Is the hostname / domain name still the same? Did you migrate the IP address or get a new one? You could find that a high % of your customers are being sent to the now non-existant shared server if you simply changed your DNS entry to the new IP - many ISP's use caching DNS servers so you may find that the better part of the Internet is still resolving to the old IP.
3. Dedicated Server doesn't necessarily mean better availability - in fact in many cases the opposite may be true. Yes you may be getting 100% of your CPU time spent on your customers (less all the worm attacks) but in that shared scenario the chances are your webhost probably built in some redundancy in their solution (they can afford to as there are lots of customers sharing it). Basic dedicated solutions tend to have no redundancy, therefore lower availability.
Cheers... hb.
Also, looking at the PPC logs from adwords looks like my conversion tracking system is registering approx 90% of the clicks. i'll attribute those other 10% to random clicking or something of the sort...i don't really know if that's normal or not, but i'll assume it is.
when i first launched the site on the shared host, i had a problem with the browser displaying a "some elements of this page aren't secure" error on my order page. for some reason that warning wouldnt display in my computers...a friend pointed it out to me.
so i'm just wondering if anyone could go on to my site and see if there are errors which don't register in any of my computers.
please private message me if you have the time to help!
Possible issues might be:
* There is an increase now in the number of Firefox users. That doesn't come with a Flash plugin out of the box - you have to d/l. Visitors to your site will see a lot of placeholders where the Flash should go until they have d/l-ed the plugin. That could put-off those that fall into this category.
* Since you measure conversion from visitors hitting your index.php to those that checkout, how are you counting visits. ie it's possible you are getting more random hits or worm attacks on the new server than you had before which is registering more visits. Maybe conversion should exclude any visits that only include index.php without visiting one of the other pages as well?
Sorry no other ideas on this one.
cheers... hb.
still if anyone else could stickymail me to take a look at the site to check for errors, it would be much appreciated.
after having it happen once before, i get a bit scared of https non secure areas on my join page that everyone can see but me...
thanks
mail me for address...!
For example. I just reduced my header image from 17K to 11K, with no noticble reduction in quality and my sales dropped 41%. After two weeks, I got so paranoid, I actually put the original fat image back up. Sales did not increase, but I just had to convince myself.
Its just that for most of us, September was a very bad month for sales.
but then again...to have been operating for months and NEVER seen a single day with zero sales....and now right after switching server, having 3 days with zero sales in one week followed by a day with 3% conversion, and then another day with zero sales....makes you feel like there's something wacky going on with the server...
who knows....maybe it really will even out...not much i can do about it apparently. if it keeps up for too long, i'll do a re-design....at least i know that the traffic and buyers are our there somewhere :)
